The report, titled "Akamai State of the Internet Security Q4 2017," stated that the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack frequency in the BFSI sector increased by 50 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 over the last quarter.

"While India maintained the same position in the third quarter last year, it is interesting to note that the attacks sourced have seen a drop of approximately four million in number as compared to last quarter," the report said. The newly-released data that analysed more than 7.3 trillion bot requests per month found a sharp increase in the threat of credential abuse, with more than 40 percent of login attempts being malicious.

In Asia-Pacific, India was the second biggest source of Web Application Attacks (WAA) just behind China. Japan, Hong Kong and Australia were other countries which got a place in top five in the region.

Nearly 40 percent of over 53,000 cyber attacks in India occurred in the financial services sector during 2017, placing it at the seventh spot in the list of targeted countries globally. The country dealt with 11.5 million attacks in Q4 2017. In total, 16.5 million attacks were sourced from India.

"A key motive of attackers has always been financial profit. In the past few years, we have seen adversaries move to more direct methods to achieve that goal such as ransomware," noted Martin McKeay, senior security advocate at Akamai.

"Crypto-mining offers attackers the most direct avenue to monetise efforts by putting money immediately into their crypto wallets," McKeay added.

Globally, the top spot for most attacked and source for the most attacks was held firmly by the United States. The US was a target of 238.6 million attacks down from 323 million in Q3 and was a source of 128 million attacks in Q4 2017.